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When she comes to, she swears she can taste river brine on her tongue.
Then she registers the scream.
She throws her eyes open, which she doesn’t remember closing. She— she couldn’t see Azula anymore. Her vision is blurry, and she can hear the sounds of metal screeching on metal—
She’d grown familiar with the sound when Sokka found a sword sparring partner in Zuko.
This has a desperation to it that those spars didn’t.
(Zuko– who took a lightening strike for her– had he– did she–)
Inhale. Exhale. Focus.
The last thing she remembers is an explosive amount of heat. More than the heat from the fire Azula and Zuko had been flinging around during their Agni Kai, aided by Sozen’s Comet and singing her bangs.
Heat so intense, and then—
Now she hears a scream in front of her, and she feels cold.
Which is fine. She can work with that. She was raised in the Arctic tundra. The familiarity is almost grounding, and she lets the feeling cement her to the moment. Vision or not, headache or not, there was a fight to finish.
She doesn’t think, there isn’t time for that. So she moves.
(She remembers pulling for the water that had been flowing below the palace, running with chains at the ready for Azula. She remembers Zuko taking a lightening hit meant for her.)
Don’t think about that. Clearly Azula must have gotten in a hit while her back was turned healing Zuko. She doesn’t know how long she was out for, but what mattered right now was that she back, and now she could do something.
She plants her feet on the wooden planks below her, and lets all of the training she has learned since starting this journey with Aang take, and breathes.
She is the Waterbending teacher of the Avatar, the last Airnomad in all the nations, and she has honed her craft to be able to detect the water in the very air. She can feel the blood in people’s veins, if she focuses. She has learned to use her own sweat, if she must. She will not be defeated on this field.
She reaches out, and the river beneath their feet seems almost eager to hear her.
Interesting. She’ll take what she can get.
They say that water represents the emotions. Here, she funnels every emotion she had forced down on their adventures into a point, and then offers a hand to the water she can feel moving beneath her.
Anger that they had to keep moving to keep the Fire Nation from smothering the world’s last hope.
Rage at the Fire Nation for taking her mother.
Fear when Azula hit Aang with lightening.
And now, Azula had hit her friend with lightening again.
She would not let that stand. She feels it echo in her bones when she gains the water’s attention.
Waterbending was tricky. You had to know what you wanted, be able to picture it in your mind, and then learn to convince your element to agree to work with you. Every element was a bit different— Toph had talked about how you had to be just as stubborn as rock to move it, Aang told her once that air needed convincing you knew you could keep up with its currents, and she remembers the night Zuko reworked his flame.
Masters got faster at it as they became familiar with their element, making their relationship stronger the longer they had trained with it. A companion till the end.
So when she called to the water beneath her, she was not expecting it to call back to her, equally as pissed as it responded to her rage.
She breathed in.
She was a Master. Settling into a calm she had only learned from battles and skirmishes, she counted the water already being on her side as an advantage here, one she would not question.
As her arms rose, the water rose with it, pulled by her chi and raised the wall of water higher and higher on either sides of the platform. She let it slip through the cracks in the boards below her, raising her with it in one of the first waterbending moves she had ever seen Aang perform in the Avatar state, all those years ago. A skirt of spinning water, one that connected her the to depths of this ocean.
The spiral carried her up up up, and while she still couldn’t focus her eyes properly, she could feel her audience’s eyes glued to her. Good.
She holds the water in two towering walls that frame the battlefield. She still can’t see well, but the she can feel the water in a way she doesn’t remember ever doing so before.
She holds. Feels the waters wish to move. Holds the water with her breath, raising it inches higher yet. And then—
—exhales.
Water floods the platform in a wave that bares down harder than anything she had tried before. It was almost like the water was singing to her, and as she screamed a chorus back, it floods and rises to meet her in the air. A symphony. She whispers to the water not to return to the depths yet, to say up here with her, to cradle anyone it finds in its grip. The symphony raises an octave, and it’s almost too easy to match its tune with her chi.
From where she’s floating, it feels like half of the river has consumed the battle.
She hasn’t felt so at home in months.
She could feel where the water was void in pocket sized people shapes, but didn’t have the same familiarity that she did with her party. So not part of her friends, then— she hadn’t trained with Zuko in this, hadn’t learned his imprint underwater, so she would just have to be careful with all of them. Her vision would be welcome to come online, right about now.
Centered in her element, she focuses. Feel the water. Your vision feels like it’s shorting out, so what does the water tell you?
She counts one— two— three— five—people below the deluge. She doesn’t know when more people had gotten here. They…didn’t feel like Toph and she couldn’t feel Aang’s robes swaying in the water—
Whoever they were, they couldn’t attack now. That would have to do— maybe she could apologize later, if they were a friend. What mattered right now was she found Azula and put a stop to her rampage. Then she could heal Zuko.
She strengthened her stance into something she had seen Toph teach Aang in a canyon all those years ago, and told the water to stay as she let it rise over her head.
Learning how to breathe out a stream of bubbles and using the water around her face to hold its shape around her eyes was no easy feat. It had, however, been worth it to learn to see clearly riverbed stones and fish.
It was also handy in a fight underwater.
She used it now as she breathed out. Her vision was still blurry, but—
There!
Maybe the water was muting the colors more than she had thought, because Azula’s robes almost looked blue under the depths.
There was no mistaking her hair, however.
She must have been out longer than she realized, for Azula to be able to put her hair back up.
Think, what are your options here. You just called yourself a Master Waterbender. Don’t let that title be empty.
Earlier, she had seen the princess use her element to propel herself across the battlefield with her brother.
How had she never considered trying that underwater?
All is fair in love and fighting techniques, and she felt no shame in repurposing the method here.
Propelled, she caught up to Azula quickly, watching as a dome of ice she knew she hadn’t made crumble below them.
Azula looked to be flailing, but hadn’t noticed her yet.
Good.
She was a healer, and had seen Ty Lee fight. She knew where to send an ice shard to knock the princess out.
Then she can feel the water trying to cool around her, almost like it’s trying to freeze.
Oh absolutely not.
She whispers to it that it wants to be warm, to help her maintain her body heat. No need to freeze or get colder. They were companions in this.
Maybe she accidentally called for the waters too deep? They were known to be colder..
The water calms and she watches the princess’s squirming increase into real distress. Time to end this.
One shot to the back of the head with an ice shard does the trick. It was over so fast it almost didn’t seem fair: Azula twitched once before going limp. One down.
Her lungs were screaming. How long had she been under now? She had paid the price of her makeshift underwater goggles (thank you Sokka, for the idea) but now she needed air.
She lets the water go, crashing down except for the bit she kept encompassing her waist, and careful allows the water cradling her to leave her in a fighting stance as she lands—
And sways.
She feels…exhausted. It hits her like a tigerbison.
She could hear yelling.
“--ra!”
Was someone yelling her name?
Where was Zuko? Was he ok—
Black spots started to sprout in her vision, and she sees something bright orange streaking towards her. Warm colors belong to the Fire Nation.
She had been in a war her entire life. She barely has to think as she raises an hand and asks the water to freeze, and watches as the streak turns into a boy with his legs newly frozen to the ground.
She asks the water to stay with her as she clutches her abdomen. Her vision is getting worse— as is the shouting— but she can’t make out what they’re saying. Someone with gray hair is slowly approaching her, she thinks.
But what would Iroh be doing here? He was in the Earth Kingdom, wasn’t he? How long was she out for—
She thinks she loses some time, because next blink has the man far closer than he had been previous darkness.
She— she doesn’t think it’s Iroh. He would have said something by now. She should say something, but her tongue feels thick and heavy and won’t follow her commands to move—
She feels empty. Exhausted.
The last thing she hears as everything goes black is a scream—
“SAKURA!”